Battery and cord powered floor maintenance machines are well known in the art. Generally, battery powered floor maintenance machines are provided with at least one rotatable pad, at least one front wheel, a battery compartment, a battery pack, at least one drive motor, a driven wheel, a steering column for allowing an operator to direct the machine's movements, and two rear wheels. Cord powered floor maintenance machines generally have similar components except for the battery pack and the battery compartment.
Typically, floor maintenance machines allow the operator to steer the machine while walking behind it. This can be extremely inefficient for several reasons. First, the maximum operating speed of the machine is usually greater than that of the operator walking behind it. Also, the operator's pace will generally be reduced as the operator gets tired. Finally, the reduction in the operator's walking speed will vary greatly from operator to operator. Thus, great deviation in the time needed to complete floor maintenance will exist between different operators using the same machine. In this way operating a floor maintenance machine is unpredictable, generally inefficient, and increasingly inefficient over time. It would be desirable then to provide an apparatus and a method for maintaining floors where the time needed to complete the job was predictable and limited only by the speed of the floor maintenance machine.
Some skilled in the art have recognized this and developed floor maintenance machines that can be operated so that the operator can sit behind the machine while operating it. These inventions however greatly increase the foot print of the floor maintenance machine, which is undesirable especially when operating in small areas. Thus, an advantage of the present invention is to provide a floor maintenance apparatus comprising a floor maintenance machine and an attached sulky that allows a floor maintenance operator to operate a floor maintenance machine in a standing position.
Another advantage of the present invention is that it does not restrict the normal maneuverability of a floor maintenance machine. A further advantage of the present invention is that it actually improves the maneuverability of a floor maintenance machine when operated by an operator standing on the sulky.
In some environments the floor to be maintained may be partitioned so that there is a large area and several smaller areas. In this situation it would be desirable to allow an operator to ride behind the floor maintenance machine to care for the large area and to also allow the operator to walk behind the machine while operating in the smaller areas. However, it would be undesirable for an operator having first used the sulky to ride behind the floor maintenance machine to then have to remove the sulky in order to walk behind it. Thus, it would be desirable to provide a method and a sulky that would allow the sulky to be positioned, without removing it from the machine, so that the operator could walk behind the machine.
Therefore, another advantage of the present invention is it allows an operator to stand behind the floor maintenance machine on a sulky and also to walk behind the machine without having to remove the sulky.